Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialities are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. Ferguson's books include Empire: How...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth18 April 1964
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.
Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.
The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
To make a living space, there first had to be a killing space.
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.